1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to receiving inbound facsimile messages via email, website and/or custom application programming interface (API) integration. In particular, embodiments of the present invention relate to an improved Internet fax architecture designed for scalability, flexibility and efficient inbound facsimile processing that, among other things, allows multiple inbound addresses to be associated with a single user account of a subscriber, performs load balancing among facsimile processing resources, dynamically selects appropriate facsimile processing resources based on various factors and accommodates facsimile processing resources having different configurations and/or differing capabilities or capacities.
2. Description of the Related Art
Existing Internet fax systems have numerous limitations in terms of the scalability and flexibility of their architectures and user-facing flexibility. The user-facing inflexibility exhibited by existing Internet fax systems results in part from an underlying assumption that a subscriber is an individual user rather than a company having multiple users. As such, attempting to use such Internet fax systems in a multi-user environment typically requires compromise in terms of one or more of expense, features and security. For example, in existing Internet fax systems, the destination address (i.e., the dialed fax number) is assumed to have a one-to-one relationship with a particular end user. This assumption is inconsistent with a typical desired usage model in which multiple members of a project team may all wish to have access to faxes received on a particular inbound fax number. Similarly, administrative staff that support multiple project teams may need to have access to faxes received on multiple inbound fax numbers. While companies have found workarounds to deal with some of the limitations of existing Internet fax systems by sharing user accounts and/or subscribing to more fax numbers than desired, for example, a more flexible architecture that better suits the needs of corporate users is needed.